4.2.12 WC: 191694 White House switchboard tried unsuccessfully to reach me. (The White House has an unparalleled capacity to reach people. Once when flying on a commercial flight, the pilot came out and whispered in my ear, “the President is on the radio-phone. I took the call in the cockpit.) I was on a beach, which had no cell phone service. When I got back to my house, there were seven frantic messages that the President needed to see me right away. He was staying a couple of miles away from our house, at the home of Dick Friedman in Edgartown. I jumped into my old Volvo and drove straight to Friedman’s house. The Secret Service man at the end of the road waved me through, telling me that the President was expecting me. But I was then stopped by another Secret Service man, telling me that the rules required that they search under the hood, so I would have to lift it up. I started looking for the mechanism to open the hood. After a few minutes, the Secret Service man smiled and said, “Professor you don’t know how to open up the hood on your own car, do you?” I responded sheepishly, “I’m not sure.” I then asked him if he had heard of the comedian Jackie Mason? He said yes. I said, “Jackie Mason tells a joke about how when a non-Jew hears knocking under the hood of his car, it makes his day. He gets in there and he fixes and fixes. But when a Jew hears knocking under the hood of his car, he immediately trades it in for anew one.” He laughed, and showed me where the lever was. I then drove down the road a short distance where the President was waiting for me in his jogging shorts. He had already heard that I didn’t know how to open up the hood of my own car and laughingly wondered whether he should be seeking advice from such a klutz. During the height of the Lewinsky affair, I found myself sitting right next to the President at a large dinner party. He asked me what I was working on and I told him I was finishing a book called the Genesis of Justice about the first